An answer was expected of him. “Great,” he said, trying to imagine himself as his father’s best man. Trying to be enthusiastic. “That’s really something.”
It was all right. Keith was off and running, as excited as he would ever be. “My father said he’s sending a friend’s plane for me. An eight-passenger Cessna. Then he asked to speak to my mother. Like an ass, I should’ve said she was out, in the can, anything. Instead”—Keith’s face was suddenly wiped clean of all emotion, as if an eraser had been drawn across it—“instead, I put her on the phone, and that’s when the shit hit the fan. She said I couldn’t go. She said it was March, exam time, that I couldn’t miss school, that the whole thing was ridiculous, out of the question. So then my father said if necessary, he’d come up and personally escort me down to Palm Beach. He’d come to the school and explain the situation to Gleason, who he was sure would understand.
“Then she said, ‘You try it, buster. Just you try it,’ and they were off on one of their better donnybrooks.” Keith stopped walking, faced him. The sky seemed very close, resting on the treetops. Wind slithered slyly, looking for a place to light. Neither of them wore parkas or gloves. He felt like walking, wanted to get inside somewhere it was warm. But Keith hadn’t finished his story. He hugged himself, wanting to hear, not wanting to, knowing there would be no happy ending.
“They fight over me like two dogs over a bone.” Keith threw wide his arms. “I can’t believe it. It’s not me they want so much as they want an excuse to hurt each other. That I know. It’s not me. I used to think it was but it’s not. I’m the weapon each one of them uses to get back at the other.” They walked slowly up the steps to the study hall. “The upshot is they wind up screaming at each other long distance. Expensive screaming, huh?”
He stayed quiet and tried to look understanding. He was very cold. And weary, so weary. As if what Keith was saying had happened to him and not to Keith.
“So then of course she had to have a little drink to calm herself down.” Keith held the door open and he walked into the study hall, a decrepit, somewhat battered building on the school grounds. The hall was thinly carpeted, long and narrow and dark. Four rooms led directly off it, each identically equipped with Salvation Army furniture. The heating was inadequate, a unifying feature of all buildings at St. Mark’s.
“So that was that.” Keith ran a finger across his throat. “One drink is suicide. She can’t have one. She’s got to have eight. A minimum of eight. I wonder if my father did that on purpose. Told her about getting married and wanting me to be best man, I mean. Just to get her going.” Keith looked at him with glittering eyes.
He turned away, shocked, and said, “He wouldn’t do that, would he?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. You should’ve seen the guy she dragged home last night.” Keith bounded from one subject to another with astonishing ease. “His neck was bigger around than my waist. A regular Dallas Cowboy.”
“What happened? Did they arrest the guy or what?”
“He took after one of the cops, and they both tackled him. Lucky for them he was drunk, or he’d have wiped up the pavement with them. The neighbors had a real show. They were hanging out of the windows like a circus had come to town.” Keith’s voice was full of bitterness. “It’ll give those old crones something to chew over for weeks. Who knows? We might get evicted.” Keith and his mother lived in an apartment whose walls were thin. Through them could be heard a symphony of flushing toilets, domestic arguments, TV explosions, gunfire. It was not a place for secrets.
“Those drying-out joints run into big bucks,” Keith said. A door opened at the end of the hall. They scuttled into the lavatory. He washed his hands in hot water, trying to warm them, avoiding the sight of his own face in the mirror. He knew better than to offer anything other than his ear and his attention. He’d learned the hard way. The last time this kind of thing had happened, he’d made the mistake of offering advice. Keith had turned tense, his manner chilly. Keith didn’t want advice, he wanted someone to unload his troubles on, someone he could trust not to tell. And he was that person. He didn’t mind. Keith knew he’d keep his lip buttoned. He and Keith were friends. That was what friends were for.
“I could always knock myself off,” he heard Keith say over the sound of running water. “Then she could collect my life insurance and be in fat city for about ten minutes.”
“You’ve got life insurance?” he asked, amazed. “I thought only parents and old people had life insurance.”
“My father was in insurance before he got into real estate,” Keith said. “He messes around with a lot of different jobs. He gets bored easily. Anyway, for my birthday when I was nine, or maybe ten, he gave me a policy as a present. I’m worth twenty-five thou on the hoof. About right for one good night on the town. Or one good week in the bin.” Keith laughed his short, humorless laugh.
As they went out into the hall, the bell rang. Mrs. Arthur was there, clapping her hands, sending her dewlaps dancing.
“Order, boys, order!” she sang out in her gravelly voice. Rumor had it that Mrs. Arthur owed her exalted position as study hall head to the fact she was making it with Mr. Gleason, headmaster of St. Mark’s. Mr. Gleason was Dickensian in appearance, his elongated body wrapped in ancient tweeds, his cheeks hollowed by debauchery. He affected a stick while walking about the grounds. His dog even looked like the Hound of the Baskervilles. His arms and legs and nose were all very long and thin; Keith had christened him Spider.
Mr. Gleason was all right, actually. His smile was kind. He carried a perpetual musty odor with him, as if his pockets were filled with long-forgotten possessions in need of an airing. He had one front tooth that protruded just far enough to make closing his mouth all the way an impossibility.
“Keith Madigan!” Mrs. Arthur trilled, herding them into an empty room. “You sit there and you, John, sit on the other side of the room. I have to keep you two apart.” Mrs. Arthur twinkled at them. “You’re as chatty as a couple of girls.” Mrs. Arthur was infatuated with the sound of her own voice. She had been the sixth-grade English teacher, and every once in a while, with her eyes misting over and chest thrust forward, she’d start reciting Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” no matter that the class had been discussing Rudyard Kipling or even Walt Whitman.
“She had a heart—how shall I say—too soon made glad, too easily impressed,” Mrs. Arthur told one and all. “My Last Duchess” was a poem about a crappy old duke describing his late wife whose portrait hung on his castle wall. It was Mrs. Arthur’s favorite poem. And, as she emoted, the entire sixth grade—numb and uncomprehending, rosy faces lifted to the fluorescent light like hothouse flowers seeking the sun—was thinking its own thoughts, playing its own games.
This state of affairs, like all good things, did not last. Soon there was a new English teacher, a stiff, bowlegged young man with a bushy mustache that completely hid his mouth, leading to the rumor that he was toothless as a result of a social disease. This no-nonsense young man taught them the parts of speech, the art of diagramming a sentence, and rendered the amazing information that a story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. This was heavy going compared to what had been dished out prior to this, and they didn’t know what to make of it.
All in all, the sixth grade preferred Mrs. Arthur, who had expected nothing more of them than their undivided attention as she gave herself freely to her captive audience. And after a brief spell the young English teacher with the bushy mustache left St. Mark’s and became a teller in a bank and eventually rose to the rank of a vice-president, where he was lost forever to the parts of speech and the parsing of sentences.
After study hall ended, he and Keith trudged silently toward the gym. A crust had formed on the snow. Gray and filthy, it crunched dismally under their feet.
“Who’s your father marrying?” he asked.
“Some rich, gorgeous dame,” Keith drawled. “He doesn’t know any other kind. I’ll tell you what she l
ooks like.” Abruptly, Keith came to a halt. “She’s got these gigantic knockers.” He gestured extravagantly, outlining the knockers. “And she’s a blonde, maybe a redhead, probably in her twenties. She reads the Wall Street Journal and the National Enquirer and she dresses all in the same color. All pink, all lavender, whatever. And before my father goes out with her, he has a massage and a facial and a manicure and he holds in his stomach and holds up his head so his chins disappear and he dances up a storm. He said she could give Brooke Shields a run for her money.” Keith hunched his shoulders down into his sweater. “I didn’t even know he knew who Brooke Shields was. Usually he sticks with the golden oldies. He gets the hots over Tuesday Weld, for Christ’s sake.” Keith kicked savagely at the snow.
“My father and I are having a confrontation tonight,” he blurted, not having planned to tell Keith anything about it. He was better at listening to Keith’s problems than Keith was at listening to his. “At eight o’clock sharp we square off. He’s sitting me down to hand out the same old crap. He wants the skinny on what I’m doing with my life, what my plans are for the future. Christ, you’d think I was pushing forty and still living off him. I’m only a callow youth. I’m only sixteen, Daddy. That’s what I’m going to give him.”
To his utter dismay, he felt his eyes fill with tears. He drew his shirt sleeve across his face, pretending it was part of the act.
“Tell him to put it on tape,” Keith said in a bored voice. “That way, he can play it back when he’s in a lecturing mood.”
“Oh, I just tune out. I know all the dialogue.” He imitated his father. ‘“John, you’ve got to pull up your socks. Get your act together. Buckle down. Follow through.’ All that.”
“Fathers are full of bullshit,” Keith said. “Just because they’re fathers doesn’t mean they’ve got the answers. Keep that in mind next time he lays you out and stomps on you. They don’t know an awful lot more than we do. They just pretend, they fake a lot. One thing about my old man, he doesn’t hand me any bullshit. He knows I won’t buy it. Besides,” Keith smiled a little, “with his track record, how can he let me have it between the eyes?”
Later, on his way home, he thought about what Keith had said. Maybe it was easier dealing with a father who didn’t live under the same roof, who you saw once or twice a year. Or when you were best man at his wedding. Maybe it was easier getting along with your father if he was divorced from your mother and lived far away and your mother and father fought over you and tried to get in good with you. He smiled to himself, imagining his father trying to get in good with him. That’d be the day.
He admired his father, wanted to be like him in many ways. But if he ever had a kid of his own, an unlikely possibility, he’d pat the kid once in a while. Not too often. He wouldn’t be a pal to his kid, but he’d give him the time of day once in a while. Toss a ball around, kiss him on his birthday, stuff like that. His father almost never touched him. Except in anger, that is. Last year, he’d given his father a book on gardening for Christmas. Exactly the right book, it turned out, and his father’s face lit up when he saw it and he’d reached out and for a split second he’d thought his old man was going to hug him. But his father just said, “Terrific, John, just what I wanted.” Even so, he’d felt like a star.
Spare the rod and spoil the child, the adage went. No danger in his house. Both he and Les had had their share of spankings, Les not as many as he. But one of the good things about his sister was she never told on him. And there were plenty of opportunities. He’d taken his father’s last pack of cigarettes and he and Jimmy Howard had smoked their little brains out behind the garage and she didn’t tell. He’d driven the new car up and down the driveway and broken the taillight. She didn’t tell. Lots of things she kept to herself. Les was definitely not a squealer. He loved her for that.
The last time he’d been spanked, he’d prepared for trouble by sticking his arithmetic workbook inside his pants. When his father’s hand had landed, whammo, in just the right place, the old man had been cured of spanking him forever.
When he was ten, he’d fallen off his bike and broken his arm. It was a Saturday and his mother was out rolling bandages or something. His father had taken him to the hospital to have the bone set. After, they’d gone home and his father had squeezed him a glass of fresh orange juice and asked him how he felt. He said okay; then his father’s arm had, as if by accident, rested on his shoulder. He could still smell his father’s sweater. It smelled of burning leaves. Nothing else smelled like burning leaves except burning leaves, which you couldn’t do anymore due to pollution.…
He had an idea for a TV commercial. Skinny guy, hollow chest, glasses, wispy hair, resembling Woody quite a bit, is raking leaves. All of a sudden girls are coming out of the woodwork, from behind trees, coming up out of manholes, they’re everywhere, attacking the guy like Indians going after Custer at Little Big Horn. All on account of the way the guy smells. He rakes a big pile, strikes a match to it, then varoom! the product shot. This would have to be a commercial for an after-shave called, you guessed it, Burning Leaves. If he could just get it past the environmentalists.
If he didn’t make it as a gag writer for Woody, he might be able to cut the mustard as a hotshot TV-commercial writer. The world was loaded with opportunities, he figured.
6
“For God’s sake, John, sit up straight and stop dropping food all over the tablecloth. Anyone looking at you would think you’d been raised in a cave.”
“Henry,” Ceil said.
He drew himself up ostentatiously and sat erect. John Hollander, West Point cadet. He carried each mouthful of dinner to his mouth with slow deliberation, chewed every bite twelve times, and washed it all down with precise sips of milk. In the heavy silence of the dining room, he could hear himself swallow.
“Hey, you two.” His mother’s face was white, her lips pressed into a thin, tense line. “Something interesting must’ve happened to you today, out there in the world. I crave conversation.”
Doggedly, his father ate his mashed potatoes. It was his habit to eat all of one thing before he tackled another.
“Ma,” he said brightly, “did you know that Woody’s real name is Allen Stewart Konigsburg? And I just read that he shelled out three mil for a house in the Hamptons because he wants to escape the madding crowd. How about that?”
His father looked up and said, “Woody who?”
He considered saying “You don’t know who Woody is?” imitating his father’s attitude when he, John, didn’t know some fact his father found essential to an understanding of world affairs. Instead, he said, “Woody Allen, Father. The greatest comic of the twentieth century. He drives a yellow Rolls and eats oatmeal with butter on it and hangs out at Elaine’s.”
His father laid down his fork and wiped his mouth. “If you paid as much attention to your schoolwork as you do to some fly-by-night comedian, you might be president some day,” he said. “If you’ll excuse me, Ceil, I have a telephone call to make. I’ll be waiting for you, John. Give me ten minutes.”
After his father had gone, he said, “Can you just please let me in on something, Ma? How come he gets away with leaving the table before we’re all finished? If I tried that, he’d shoot out both of my knees. What is this, a double-standard-type operation? And what makes him think I want to be president? The guy’s cracking up.”
His mother rested her head in one hand. “You know something, John? I’m sick of acting as go-between. It’s exhausting. I’m running out of steam. Why do you have to fight all the time?”
“Ask him. What’s bugging him. He’s always on my back. Tell him to lay off. What does he want? I’m not on drugs, I stay out of jail. What does he want? If I knew, maybe I could deliver.” His throat felt scratchy, pressure built up behind his nose, a sign of imminent emotion that he knew neither he nor his mother could handle right now. Hastily, he got up and took the plates out to the kitchen.
“Darling,” his mother said. He knew she felt
bad about the fact that he and his father were always at each other’s throats. Give praise where praise is due, he’d heard her say once, but even with his ear laid against the door’s crack, that’s all he’d been able to hear. They had been talking about him, that much he knew. There was a special tone in both their voices when they talked about him. Then, voice raised, his father had said, “If there’s a reason to praise him, I will. I’ve had no reason.”
Bullshit, he muttered. Double bullshit.
“He’s young, Henry,” his mother had said. “Lay off for a while. Can’t you remember what it was to be young, Henry?” His father hadn’t answered that one. That had been the end of it.…
“He’s an ace at handing out flak, Ma, and you know it.” He rinsed the plates and put them in the dishwasher. “He doesn’t give Les flak, but he sure shovels plenty my way.”
“It’s because you’re his son,” she said. “He expects a lot from you, John. He expects the best.”
“Hey,” he said, “he might not know it, but that’s what he’s getting. Every day in every way I’m dishing out my best.”
“No, John. That’s not so. You just coast. He wants you to buckle down. You’re a coaster. That’s what bugs your father.”
He contemplated his sneakers and didn’t answer. Twenty-six dollars those mothers had cost six months ago, and already they looked as if they’d been soaked in acid. He could hear his father keening when he announced he needed a new pair. “Twenty-six dollars for sneakers!” he’d wail, clutching his heart. The old man suffered from a serious time warp. Rip Van Winkle in a three-piece suit.
“Grace Lerner’s niece is visiting her from Seattle,” his mother said casually, changing the subject with a quiet clashing of gears. A warning gong sounded. Industriously, he scraped a bit of butter left on his plate onto the butter dish. Waste not, want not was the family motto.
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